Lasers and Lycra
by I.C. Weener
Summary: Luna's kinda been falling out of orbit lately.


" _And I can stay at home while I'm out of town."_

\- Weird Al Yankovic

* * *

Luna stumbled over her tangled ankles and crashed to the factory floor. She was sprawled in the shadows of countless sleeping Neoroid giants. An energy whip wound around her legs and stopped her from crawling back up. Her white blaster rested on the ground a few inches out of reach. A tactical drone named Sagria was standing over her with the handle of the whip locked in her sharpened digits.

Sagria's build was sleek and compact for her artificial race, but she was still tall enough to dwarf Luna's human stature. Her opticals carefully scanned over her enemy starting from her struggling legs. She assessed Luna's chemical reactions as a combination of anger, resentment, exhaustion, and fear.

"You're lucky I just don't destroy all traces of you from existence, _human_ ," the Neoroid vocalized. "I've spent most of my operational time despising all of you wretched lifeforms as worthless collections of carbon."

Her cold authoritative tone softened as she completed her scan. The crosshairs of her infrared vision zoomed on Luna's green eyes.

"But you, pretty one. You've recently begun to change my mind. I can see us becoming very close allies."

Luna growled in disgust at the mere thought. Her right hand began to reach over toward her left wrist.

"I'd rather be dead than help a Neoroid!"

She pushed down the cuff of her red glove and uncovered the microcomputer watch on her wrist. Before she had been spotted by the Neoroids' security drone, she had been carefully setting the building with high-powered charges. The original plan was to hotwire the whole Neoroid processing plant and remotely detonate the charges when she had slipped a safe distance away. Now she had only one choice left.

Her index finger and thumb tapped the two nobs she had configured as the detonation trigger.

Nothing happened. Her expression changed from determination to panic. She pressed the nobs again. She tried a third time. Sagria looked down at her with as a light chuckle resonated out of the corner of her oral servos.

"Did you think we weren't keeping an eye on you while you were scurrying around in here? Casshan isn't the only one we've learned to treat with caution." the Neoroid said. "You're trespassing in a facility reserved for the Lunar Organism Obliteration Division."

Her optics squinted, becoming two narrow red warning lights glowing dimly against the shadowy factory machines behind her.

"I know all your tricks, girl. That's why I assess you'll be worth something."

Luna glanced at Sagria with a defiant scowl that tried to hide her trepidation. The Neoroid tilted her neck with electronic arrogance.

"Now let's get you desequenced, shall we?"

A circular shadow expanded over Luna's head. She looked up and saw the blur of a massive glaring sun hurtling on a collision course with her.

* * *

The dust settled in the crater under Casshan's feet. He stood up in the smoke of a blast that would have killed a normal man. His fingers straightened so his hands could chop with the force of an axe. His jet thrusters warmed inside the storage compartments built in his hips. His legs tensed as they prepared to launch him forward. The golden fin adorning his forehead gleamed heroically under the clear sunlight.

His opponent was standing in the wasteland sands several yards away. Sagria shook her head coldly, silently telling him all of his struggling was a waste of time. Just beside her was a bulbous orange juggernaut wielding rocket hooks for arms and anti-personnel turrets for shoulders.

The larger Neoroid showed no personality of its own and only followed Sagria's commands. Its bipedal hydraulics sat low to the ground, signifying the robot had been built to withstand multiple forms of firepower at the expense of speed and agility. It mostly moved in short hops by burning off its back rockets when it needed to cover any significant distance.

The two sides were at a standstill. Casshan cautiously stayed poised for battle. Sagria gloated with sultry graphite lips and menacing red eyes.

"The war you're trying to wage against us ends today, Casshan," the Neoroid commander said with dangerous electricity in her voice. "I have something I'd like you to see."

She turned toward her more bulky companion in a courtly and slightly suspicious manner.

"Eclipse. Provide a LEM demonstration, please."

The dome roof of the lumbering orange Neoroid opened with a motorized whir, exposing the top of its energy core. Full moons rose around the tower.

Five bared and machine-buffed female posteriors emerged from the robot like fresh peaches desperate to escape a steel basket. The nimble human bodies they belonged to uncurled from their bent postures and stretched their spines backward like swans rising out from nuclear waves.

Metal cables were plugged into 3-inch-wide capacitors welded to their bellies where their navels would normally be. They all had matching blonde hair with light silver streaks tied into two strands that reached to their hips. The only thing they wore other than their built-in capacitors was a communications headset with a curved titanium band that went across the top of their hair and wrinkled aluminum insulation that covered their ears and the backs of their heads. The silver highlights in their hair were a byproduct of their digitally encoded genetics and their machine-governed gestation.

Casshan gasped as he recognized Luna five times.

The black ring on each of their capacitors lit up into bright green and made a short chiming sound. The metal stems unlocked from their sockets and withdrew back into the reactor tower, allowing the five figures to move unrestricted.

They spread their arms for balance and arched their legs into the air. They vaulted out of the Neoroid with a synchronized reverse flip and landed on their bare feet on the cracked desert ground. One after the other, they turned toward Casshan.

The devices branded to the bellies of the five organic beauties spun like miniature turbines. They sprayed clusters of silver particles over the naked frames of the mass-produced Lunas, forming basic athletic wear out of electron-charged nothingness. Their outfits closely resembled the gloves, boots, and low-cut leotard Luna always wore on duty, but their variation lacked Luna's extra equipment pouches and molded the leotard's colors into a single shade of metallic silver. It streamlined the design while bringing out the supple rises and valleys of their bodies with a rippled cosmic sheen. The front of the stretchy material fitted directly around their augmented umbilical sockets rather than covering the devices, allowing them to function like small digital thermometers plugged into foil-wrapped baked potatoes.

The orange Neoroid unfolded a weapons cache on his middle fuselage and a launched a set of five blasters toward the Lunas. The clones each caught their weapons out of the air and locked their fuel cartridges into the "ON" position. These blasters resembled Luna's normal sidearm with more geometric stylings and a shining chrome finish—a blatant case of reverse-engineered design.

The clones stood in a close "V" formation. The one standing in lead was indistinguishable from the other four as they locked eyes with Casshan's.

Luna Kozuki, the Made-to-Order maiden. Some of the heavier Neoroid berserkers were designed to function as mobile missile factories. Eclipse functioned as a mobile human factory.

"Impressive, wouldn't you say?" Sagria said in a proud and subtly sinister tone. "Your friend can be rather useful with the right conditioning. Now she'll always be brand new."

She glanced at Casshan with an artificially regretful frown.

"Unfortunately, Eclipse had to destroy the original copy so he could store her biometric template."

The clones saw the horror on Casshan's face. Each one spoke in identical soft girlish voices with slightly different timing. Their words overlapped and created a surreal chorus.

"What's wrong, Tetsuya? Do I frighten you?"

"It's been so long since I've seen you."

"Please don't make me fight you, Tetsuya."

"Why didn't you come to save me again, Tetsuya?"

"The Neoroids want me to make this easy for you."

Casshan backed away clutching his head in panic. It took every ounce of willpower in his half-man, half-machine body to convince himself not to be beaten by a ruthless Neoroid trick.

He regretfully clenched his fingers into iron fists and closed the combat mask over his mouth. He charged at the group of artificially-grown Lunas with determination in his eyes.

A 1-on-1 fight would have been a landslide victory in the half-robot's favor. With Luna combining her numbers advantage with her natural gravity-defying feats, however, the odds became much closer. There isn't much to say about how the battle was fought other then there were a lot of blaster shots, elaborate acrobatics, and leg strikes.

When it seemed like Casshan was getting the upper hand, Eclipse took five seconds to produce a dozen more Lunas. This second batch came out at high priority: Fully equipped with their blasters and metallic bodysuits. As Casshan struggled to fight off the endless swarm of shining metal curves and flailing blonde pigtails, one of the cookie-cutter cuties shot an electric garrote wire out of a spool tucked inside of her glove and pinned him in the back of his neck. A short battery charge jolted through a section of his spine that was both a critical circuit for robots and a major pressure point for humans, making him convulse in paralyzed agony.

Casshan staggered on his feet from exhaustion. At least ten Lunas were surrounding him in a ring with their blasters drawn. His weakened vision made him see a hundred of them.

The clones finished him off with a synchronized laser barrage. Casshan briefly appeared as a screaming being of fire as a more intense form of the radiation that ripened and tightened the bodies of the Luna clones rapidly disintegrated his own. In few seconds, all that was left of him was a smoldering pile of black ash.

The Lunas looked at their lethal handiwork with a strong sense of pride. The objective was complete and their reason for being brought into existence had been fulfilled. The lights on their navel sockets suddenly changed red.

The Neoroids designated all humans to be noxious collections of pollution, and these instant reactor-grown Luna clones weren't thought of any differently. Their typical lifespan was only as long as the mission they were produced for. It minimized the damage their existence did to the environment and kept the Earth pure. The clones—feeling the same way about their own bodies—were happy to serve as sacrifices for a cleaner world.

The Lunas smiled in unison. The mini-generators augmented to their abdomens released a charge that painlessly disintegrated every molecule in their bodies in a single instant. The generators themselves were destroyed in the same process, leaving only a brief sparkle of electrons hanging in the air.

Sagria rested her manipulators against her fenders and vocalized a small, satisfied "Hm." She beckoned casually toward her bulkier companion as she turned to walk away.

"Come, Eclipse. The humans are defenseless now that Casshan has been retired. We're going to need a steady quantity of infiltrators that are greasy enough to slip through the cracks of the resistance. You're going to be rather busy next week."

* * *

 _Author's note: This started off as a rough concept for a Luna-Sagria body-swapping story called "Cybernetic Carnival." That title (and some of the basic body-swapping hijinks) ended up going to that Sailor Moon S story I wrote almost two months ago. Then I briefly considered calling this story "Bootyshock Excelsius" (because it involves a Booty going through some form of Shock), but then I used it for that Misa fanfic I wrote out of nowhere. That's the point I settled on the name "Lasers and Lycra" for what this story eventually became. But then I was playing Wild Guns Reloaded recently, and ALLLL of the stuff I had outlined for the original Luna fanfic ending getting adapted to a steampunk setting to become "Carburetors and Corsets" (and goddamn, I mean like 99% of my Luna narrative wound up there). The only major difference between Luna's bad landing and Annie's calamity is I was taking more of a Quentin Tarantino approach in the Luna version where the scenes are out of order and the descriptions at the beginning blur who's who and what's going (this is why Annie is just referred to as "generic fleshy thing" for most of her story). That forced me to rethink the subject matter I was going to use for this story, and that's how we finally wound up here with this weird cloning thing involving Luna and Sagria. I'm gonna go play as Funky Kong in Tropical Freeze now._


End file.
